Baker Academic

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

The Jesus Conference Roster: Richard Bauckham and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory—Chris Keith

Photo richardbauckham.co.uk

On June 10 and 11, I and the other Jesus Bloggers (except Brant Pitre!) will gather at St Mary's University, Twickenham along with a host of other scholars for the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible's conference "Memory and the Reception of Jesus in Early Christianity." Quite a number of people are already registered, but there's still a few spaces to attend if you'd like to join us. Information, a list of presenters, and registration (including a special discount for students) are available at this link. (I'm especially desirous that students attend. We design our conferences purposefully to be low-key with lots of tea and coffee breaks so that the participants can actually chat with each other. There are thus lots of opportunities for students to speak with the scholars presenting and attending.) From what I can gather as the organizer of the conference, many of the presenters (including me) are viewing this conference as an opportunity to clarify precisely what the "memory approach" is and is not, as many of us feel that there's quite a bit of misinformation being reported in journal articles and SBL papers.

In the lead-up to this conference, I want to introduce a few of the presenters and their topics. Today's focus is on Richard Bauckham. Bauckham is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and currently resides in Cambridge. Among his numerous, numerous publications, his blockbuster Jesus and the Eyewitnesses caused a tremendous amount of agreement and disagreement and engaged directly with memory theory. He is currently working on a second edition of that important book, which I'm told is finished and hopefully will be out by SBL.

Bauckham is the only scholar at the conference who will be presenting directly upon cognitive memory research (though I suspect that Alan Kirk will also address the topic in his paper) and his paper is titled "The Psychology of Eyewitness Memory." I've seen the paper. I don't want to give away too much, but I'll say this: Bauckham thinks that Dale Allison got the implications of research on eyewitness memory wrong in Allison's own blockbuster Constructing Jesus. Want to hear more and hear Bauckham tangle with Allison? Come to the conference!

Most--though not all--the papers will be published as part of a three-volume reference work, The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, which I am editing with Helen Bond, Jens Schroeter, and Christine Jacobi. It will be published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

I cringe when I see the words 'reference work' because they are so often very, very expensive. Does the fact that it is Bloomsbury T&T Clark mean that it will be available in paperback for those of us who are not university libraries? :-)

And on the issue of memory approaches, have you read Ruben Zimmermann's Puzzling the Parables? He doesn't really address the psychological material at all, but I think he has done a very good job of picking up the implications of social memory studies in a systematic way.

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Le Donne, Keith, Pitre, Crossley, Jacobi, Rodríguez

James Crossley (PhD, Nottingham) is Professor of Bible, Society, and Politics at St. Mary's University, Twickenham, London. In addition to most things historical Jesus, his interests typically concern Jewish law and the Gospels, the social history of biblical scholarship, and the reception of the Bible in contemporary politics and culture. He is co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Christine Jacobi studied protestant theology and art history in Berlin and Heidelberg. She is research associate at the chair of exegesis and theology of the New Testament and apocryphal writings. She completed her dissertation at the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 2014. She is the author of Jesusüberlieferung bei Paulus? Analogien zwischen den echten Paulusbriefen und den synoptischen Evangelien (BZNW 213), Berlin: de Gruyter 2015. Christine Jacobi is a member of the „August-Boeckh-Antikezentrum“ and the „Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften“.

Chris Keith (PhD, Edinburgh) is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

Anthony Le Donne (PhD, Durham) is Associate Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary. He is the author/editor of seven books. He is the co-founder of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts Consultation and the co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Brant Pitre (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is Professor of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Among other works, he is the author of Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile (Mohr-Siebeck/Baker Academic, 2005), and Jesus and the Last Supper (Eerdmans, 2015). He is particularly interested in the relationship between Jesus, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins.

Rafael Rodríguez (PhD, Sheffield) is Professor of New Testament at Johnson University. He has published a number of books and essays on social memory theory, oral tradition, the Jesus tradition, and the historical Jesus, as well as on Paul and Pauline tradition. He also serves as co-chair of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Books by the Jesus Bloggers

To purchase, follow these links

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Jesus and the Last Supper

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Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text